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The Special Investigations Group of the CI Staff (CI/SIG)

CI/SIG (the Special Investigations Group) did not exist
prior to the establishment of the CI Staff in early 1955, Its
major functions as described in CSI No, 70-1 of March 1955 are
much more modest than the functions ascribed to it in a write-up
by the Staff in early 1973. The 1955 description of functions
is as follows: 7

"Special Investigation Unit

"Major Functions

"Performs the CI investigation and analysis of any
known or potential security leak in the Clandestine
Services organization, whether in headquarters or in
the field, from the standpoint of its effect on (1)
existing operations, and (2) the cover of personnel.
In performing this function, maintains close working
relations with the Security Office, the latter being
primarily concerned in such cases from Agency
sectrity rather than an operational security stand-
poirt,''

By 1973 the description of tasks which had been assigned
to CI/SIG or which they had absorbed during the course of
events over a period of nearly two decades provides a much
broader range of functions and responsibilities, They are listed
as follows;

"CI/Special Investigations Group

"1, Conducts research into the long-range validity
of CIA operations in terms of known or potential hostile
capabilities, including penetrations, and of Agency security.

"2, Carries out coordination with the Office of Security
in such cases.

"3. Maintains and uses sensitive counterintelligence
holdings, including certain Comint and defector materials,
to match these against operational and personality data
and thus to derive operational leads.

"4, Coordinates and cooperates with counterintelligence
and security elements of other departments and agencies of
the USG to detect, tabulate, and take counter-action against
hostile plans or approaches abroad for the recruitment of
American officials (American Targets Program).

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"S. Plays a direct role in sensitive counterintel-_
ligence liaison with closely allied foreign intelligence
services on hostile penetration plans and operations,

"6. Reviews: compatibility between cover and
assignments of CIA staff members.

"7, Maintains central data on leaks to the news
media and assists the Office of Security, as necessary,
in determining the sources of leaks.

"8, Maintains central data on the nature and
extent of known compromise of Agency staff personnel
to intelligence services, whether liaison or hostile.

2 "9, Prepares studies of individuals, including
[journalists) whose foreign intelligence connections are
a source of concern.

10, Carries out additional and sensitive tasks as
assigned by the C/CI,"

The first chief of the Special Investigation Unit (SIU) (as
it was called in CST NO. 70-1) was Birch O'Neal, a former FBI
officer who had transferred to CIA after World War I1,* In the
mid-fifties,SIG had rather slim picking and appears to have spent
most of its time investigating various aspects of the [Lemay Foiti7
complex (the [boris “Norrod] case) as it affected US interests based
on information the Agency acquired from foreign sources. Then in.
1962 SIG received its biggest shot in the arm with the defection
of Golitsyn who brought with him several dozen leads to American
citizens including some supposedly in CIA. The handling of these
leads was assigned to SIG by Angleton, including the information
emanating from Golitsyn, which related to foreign countries. Thus
O'Neal and his assistant, Jean Evans, played a major role in
directing the handling of the Golitsyn leads (or "Serials" as
Angleton invariably called them). The activity continued through-
out the sixties reaching its apex in the period 1964-65 when the

HONETOL investigations (of CIA staff officers) was at its most

*The term Special Investigations Group (SIG) became common
usage in the sixties but no exact date can be assigned for
this change.

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[Isract, and a contract agent in New York. In addition to the
Office of the Chief (including two special assistants and a
Secretariat) the Staff was composed of seven "Divisions" and
four "Groups.”} y

2

For fiscal year 1958 the CI Staff budget was sf, 650, 000).

2y
The sun of {1,800,004 was allotted for Fiscal Year 1959, and.

2
82,060,006] was to be requested for 1960. Specific figures were
quoted in the appropriate sections for projects or support,
such as travel. ‘Otherwise the budget was almost solely for
salaries of Staff personnel.

The survey next gave brief attention to deception, agreeing
that it had to be carefully compartmented and that it best
belonged jn the CI Staff. On the subject of the “Special Investi-
gation Unit, however, the survey took its first serious exception

te
to the organization and operation of the Staff stating: -
"Hence, in order not to contaminate a senior staff
(CI Steff) with Agency employee investigation and/or

.exploitation, this should be done by individuals with

CE ability within a special section of the Office of

Security. It is ;

"Recommended that:

‘a, The DD/P release for assignment to the Office

of Security several individuals, as may be appropriate,

of proven CE ability to handle and exploit all cases of

CE aspect involving Agency personnel;

". SID and its function be eliminated from CI
Staff; and

"c. The DCI approve the above recommendations."

The survey team took special note of the Projects Branch of |

CI Staff, the section that handled the mail opening project.

How it was operated and viewed in 1959 is not without interest

in view of its subsequent role in the “Family Jewels" issue when .

it was revealed to the Rockefeller and “Church Committees. Thus

it is revealing to note the 1959 survey found nothing wrong with

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the mail opening program except they worried about its security
and also thought it would be more effective if expanded. This
is how the survey described the project in 1959:

"a. The Project Branch conducts a project of
censorship within the US of mail from the USSR which
is called HTLINGUAL. Originally this project was
developed by the Office of Security at the request
of SR Division in 1952. Its purpose was to identify
and to obtain samples of handwriting and basic back-
ground facts on long established correspondence
between persons in the USSR and the United States.
Such information was to be used operationally to
sustain any communications with secret writing,

_which would likely pass the Soviet censors and could
be picked up in the U.S.A. The interception is done
at the central Post Office in New York, and the
letters are delivered to the Agency for processing
and return. As the need for Soviet communication

' camouflage lessened with the increase of legal
travel to and from the USSR the Project was re-
oriented and expanded toward direct CI and FI goals
in September 1956, and it was taken over by the
CI Staff. ;

27
~ "b. At present this sroup,jncludes live]
employees in New York and[fiftéep] at Headquarters, «
Those in New York are under the Office of Security;..
those in Headquarters under the CI Staff. The
yearly cost is the total of the various salaries,

"c. The primary purposes of this Project are to
produce CE information, operational leads and any
positive intelligence that can be gleaned from the
mail.

"d, The operation in New York photographs
about 50,000 envelopes per month out of a total of
about 200,009 ‘letters coming from the USSR to in-
dividuals in the U.S.A. via New York, These films
are forwarded to Headquarters and examined in the

’Projects Branch and some 10,000 of them are selected
on the basis of Agency interest in the areas of
origin in Russia. These 10,000 negatives are then
made into prints, and the names of the addressees
are recorded alphabetically on IBM cards. From the
IBM cards RI makes a continuing record and a copy
of this record of names is returned to the Projects
Branch. .

"e, About 1,000 of these intercepts are opened
per month in New York by the Office of Security,
the letters verifaxed and copies sent to the Projects
Branch at Headquarters. There is a watch list of
some 500 names on file both in the Branch at Head-.
quarters and in the Security Office in New York and
any letters coming from or going to any of the names

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on this list are opened. This watch list is revised
quarterly. It is made up of names of interest princi-
pally to CI, SR Division, and the Security Office,

and includes names listed by the FBI.

"f, There are trained linguist-analysts in the
Branch who extract information of interest from the
intercepts, and the disseminabjlity of this information
is determined by the Chief of Projects Branch. At
present the rate of dissemination from Projects Branch
runs at an average of about 150 per month and the
number is. increasing. Sixty percent of these dissemina-.
tions are positive intelligence. The disseminations :.~
are controlled by the Deputy Chief of CI Staff.

"g. SR Division’ has obtained valuable operational
leads from this Project, and the FBI wants as much>*
information as it can get by this means. .

"h, There are 40 individuals in CIA who are
officially cleared to know about this Project, These
include members of SR Division, Office of Security,

CI Staff, and RI Machine Records, COPS, DD/P, DD/S,
Director of Personnel (due to his previous service in the
DD/P) and the Chief, FI Staff. The DCI, DDCI and the IG
Staff also have access. to the Project.

w"i. It would appear from present results that much
moTreevalue could be obtained from this Project if more
intercepts were opened. Project Branch is at present»
handling four times as much volume as it did in the past
with the same number of personnel and at the same cost.

“Its staff at Headquarters is capable of handling 2,000

per month with the present T/0, but the New York staff
could not supply that number of opened intercepts unless
its personnel was increased. It is felt by the Branch
that a rate of 4,000 intercepts per month would be a
good future goal. It is estimated that this would
require an increase of one interceptor, one secretary
and one letter opener in New York and an addition to
Project Branch at Headquarters of four linguist-analysts,
four clerical personnel and one reports officer.

"j. The Office of Security, which works with
Project Branch, is agreeable to the’ gradual expansion of
the operation. It would be in favor of expanding at
present to the extent of opening more intercepts, and 7
taking samples of these intercepts for S. W. This could
be done by the aforementioned increase of Security Office
personnel in New York without an immediate increase in the
Headquarters staff. It would be operationally much more
feasible if a secure room could be obtained in the Post
Office in New York for their sole use.. Since the DCI
made the original arrangement for this operation with the
Chief Postal Inspector, any changes in the system of
operation should be made in the same way. This is the
only level at which such arrangements could be accom- ;
plished securely." _

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versus area division prerogative in the conduct of operations.
Noting that there might have been some immediate reasons for the
CI Staff to take on operational aspects in its efforts to increase
CI activity, nevertheless it concluded these reasons were not
necessarily based on the best operational and organizational pro-
cedures and methods. ‘The normal staff functions, the survey
opined, could be carried out effectively with a much smaller but
highly experienced staff whose impact and counsel would more
favorably be received by the operating elements of the DD/P. The
team also concluded that there had been insufficient attention
given to penetrating hostile intelligence organizations and
recommended that: ;

"Chief, CI direct the efforts of the Cl Staff: toward
the development of programs for the aggressive pursuit of
penetration activity against hostile intelligence services."
Ina forward to the report, the “Inspector General of the day,

Lyman “Kirkpatrick, directed special attention to one particular .
aspect of CI work.

"The “Special Investigation Division assists the
Office of Security in using DD/P assets to trace leads
concerning CIA employees. This is probably a necessary
assist to the Office of Security but should be handled
with the utmost of discretion and security. It would be
very seriously damaging to the efforts’ of the CI Staff
if it ever became known that it was engaged ‘in any_ .
activities involving CIA employees. An analgous situation
is the stir caused by the occasional misimpression created
abroad that CIA reports on‘other US Government employees.
Thus within CIA the. Office of Security must be the sole
unit to bear the stigma of being concerned with fellow
employees." \

Unfortunately this sensible warning was not heeded by CI
Staff management, or by the management of the Clandestine Service
as a whole for that matter. Instead, in.the mid~1960s the CI,
Staff, with SIG in the vanguard, hypnotized by the allegations

v
of Golitsyn, launched HONBTOL - the active investigation of.

numerous Agency employees (five in particular) - with generally

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had written a provecative analysis that found Nosenko bona
fide and challenged as incorrect the Monster Plot
assessments to the contrary. Even more provocative, he had
provided a copy directly to then DDCI Richard Helms when
stymied within tha Soviet Division in promoting his view.
Kalaris first learned of this well after McCoy joined the
staff, when McCoy himself told him. Angleton, on the other
hand, was certainly not unaware of this part of McCoy's
background, and it is likely that he and Rocca and Miler
interpreted Kalaris's selection of McCoy as evidence that

Kalaris was out to discredit then.

Kalaris, originally having been summoned home to take
over temporarily until a replacement. for Angleton could be
found, had a title in the beginning as “Acting Chief,
crlors.* In March, Nelson told him, "We haven't found
anybody yet," and as time went on it looked increasingly as
if he and colby were not going to find anyone. But by this
time Kalaris was becoming intrigued with what he was doing,
and with the potential of the job. fie went back co[srasitial’7
to see his family in late March, and when he returned he
told Nelsen he would take the job on a permanent basis. In
June, the “Acting” was dropped and Kalaris became Chief,

CIOPS.

What Kalaris Found...

The state of Affaire

As he looked around, Kalarig found what struck him as a
desolate situation. Mountains of traffic were coming in to
the staff, but none of it seemed to be of much importance.

The staff had no relationship vith the Soviet Division or

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any of the other geographic divisions. If the divisions had

t

any significant cases, Kalaris was unaware of them because
the divisions were giving him nothing of substance. McCoy's
arrival in the staff made thie picture unmistakably clear
since, fresh from SE Division and a position therein that
made him privy to virtually al] the division's sensitive
cases, he was able to tel) Kalaris what he was missing on

the SE front.

It also before long became evident that there was an
element of a two-way street in thie eituation. Soviet-East
European cases were discovered in CY Staff files that the
area divisions had never been informed of or had only
limited information about. Thase included such cases as
MORINE (8 past FBI source of voluminous GRU operational
documents who was known to the Soviet Division but whose
operational leads had been shared neither with that division
nor with the other geographic divisions in whose territory
the Soviet agents were working) ;[ KITTYHAWK] (a KGB officer
who had contacted CIA during a visit to the United States
several years back and who figured in a double-agent gane
being run by the FBI) ; [GRIDIRON] (Leslie Jamas Bennett,
former senior officer in Soviet counterespionage in the
Canadian RCMP who had resigned from that service in 1972
under a cloud of suspicion engendered by the Angleton staff
and its guru Anatoliy Golitsyn--a case never briefed to

/
either SE or EUR Division); and {we tvor) also known as [ozone]
( Eonatantin Dunitracneson, a Romanian jintelligence officer
who defected in [istaei) in 1972 and subsequently came to this
country and was debriefed by CIOPS officers, but whose
information and leads had not been furnisned to the axea

@ivisions) .

Many of the people in the staff had been hand-picked by
Angleton. They had been in their jobs for a number of years
and were well settled into their way of doing things. So

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wall in fact that: most had given up hope of ever going
anywhere else or accomplishing anything new.
Compartmentation was a way of life, and management was
remote from the rank and file. Kalaris was appalled to
learn that his chief of support, who had worked in the staff
for four or five years, had never mat Angleton; he had only
Ff seen him from a distance, The overall atmosphere seemed to

Kalaris to be conditioned by doublethink and mirrors.

Compartmentation in the Angleton staff had been carried
to such extremes, however, as to become counterproductive.
With Angleton not. disposed to be forthcoming with his
successor, and Rocca and Miler taking their lead from him
(and Hood already having left the staff and the Agency some
months earlier), it was difficult for the Kalaris team to
find out what the staff had been doing. Like the blind men
and the elephant, the parsonnel below the top leadership had
never been exposed to more than thair own narrow slice of
staff activities, and accordingly even with the best of will
they were limited in what they were able to tell the new
management. The MORINE' case (see below) provided a vivid

illustration of this point.

McCoy, with his Soviet Division background, was
particularly struck at the almost total absence of Soviet
Ff expertise in the staff. There was no Russian language
capability and no realistic area knowledge, and what
experiance there was in Soviet matters was dated and
limited. This was the case not only in R&A, but in the

Operations Group as well.

One of the first things Kalaris had to do after
assuming office was find out what was in the 6afes and
vaults in the Angleton premises. This ultimately took

months, as there were several vaults and many safes

containing among them large quantities of paper. All this

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had to be reviewed, and not only for the purpose of
determining what it was all about. Significant segments: of
this material, it was discovered, were unique to the CI
Staff and had never been integrated into the DO file and
records system. Information from the mail-intercept
program, for example, was indexed inside the CI Staff, put
reflected nowhere outside. Other material largely
duplicated files maintained by other elements. Some files
contained Mostly press clippings. Decisions had to bé made
and action taken, item by item, on indexing, transfer of
files, determinations of what needed to be retained and what
could or should be destroyed, etc. As the magnitude of this
task became evident, arrangements were made for personnel
from IMS to be detailed to the etaff on a long-term basis to

go through the material.

In a vaulted area across from Angleton's office a
couple of safes were found for which no combination could be
located, and which accordingly had to be drilled by
specialists from the Office of Security. Kalaris rejects as
untrue the image conveyed in Mangoid's hook about Angleton
that has him personally leading SWAT teams of safecrackers
as they went about opening the Angleton safeas,* but it is
correct that he was present during the drilling. He had
Naver seen this operation performed before, and was

interested to observe how it was done.

Some curious and some disquieting things turned up as
the new team gradually made its way through the Cl Staff

premises.

--On the lighter side, in one safe two Bushman bows and
some arrows were found. Concerned about the poesibility

that the arrows might be poisoned, Kalaris had them sent--

* Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior, Simon & Schuster, 1991,

pp. 327-330 wa
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very carefully--to OTS for examination.* When they were
retuxned, with a judgment that they were harmless, Kalaris

gave them to Angleton as a personal memento.

VF

° CI ‘Staff Memo CI 136-75, 10 July 1975

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--In a more gerious vein, files vere found on the

assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother

‘Robert F. Kannedy. These included autopsy pictures of the

remains of Robart Kennedy. Although Nosenko's account of
the KGB'6é involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald and his denial
that the KGB had anything to do with the murder of John
Kennedy ‘might reasonably explain an Angleton interest in the
John Kennedy assassination, neither Kalaris nor Blee, with
whom Kalaris cansulted on thie bizarre finding, had any idea
why Angleton had the pictures. Neither could they think of
any reason why it was appropriate for CI Staff files to

contain them. They were accordingly destroyed.

--Angleton's dogged pursuit, inspired by Golitsyn and
his theories, of Saviet intelligence penetration of CIA had
led to secret investigations, stretching ever a period of
many years, of over forty serving CIA officers. Known a6
the HONETOL cases, and later sometimes referred to in the
popular literature as the Great Molehunt, this activity had
produced extensive files in the CI Staff.* In addition,
eeverai hundred files were found on American citizens who
were not CIA personnel but on whom Golitsyn analysis had
similarly cast some sort of KGB shadow. Among the most
noteworthy of these were files on W. Averell Harriman and
Henry Kissinger. Most of these files were composed entirely

of newspaper reports and a few FBI reports.

--Classified materials, in quantities that ultimately
filled several packing boxes, were eventually found in
Golitsyn's possession at nis[upseat new York/ farm hause.
Some of this material consisted of personnel-type files on
CIA staff officers. Golitsyn, who resisted returning these

s
documents when Kalaris sant people to retrieve then, ‘

* The term “HONETOL,* used as an acronym, allegedly derives
from a combination of parts of the last name of FBI Director
John Edgar Hoover and the first name of Soviet KGB defector

and Angleton guru Anatoliy Golitsyn.

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maintained that Angleton and Miler had given these files to
him to review and to keep as long as he needed them, and he
was not finished with them yet. Ultimately, all the files

that were found were retrieved from Golitsyn, though it has
never been possible to be certain that this represented all

the files that he in fact had.

-~A potentially explosive find surfaced in June: a bag
of mail from the mail-intercept--HTLINGUAL--progqram. It had
been the public exposé of HTLINGUAL and the MHCHAOS program,
infiltration of domestic leftist and dissident groups in
search of insidious foreign sponsorship, in a front page
story by Seymour Hersh in The New York Times on 22 December
1974 that had precipitated Colby's decision to force ©
Angleton's retirement, and led to establishment in 1975 of
the Rockefeller Commission on CIA Activities in the United
States, and the Church (Senate) and Pike (House) committees
to investigate CIA and its activities. Both these programe
had been CI Staff responsibilities. CIA was receiving
letters from citizens who believed CIA had intercepted their
mail, a CI Staff representative had just finished briefing
the Senate Select Committee Start on the subject,* and Colby
en 16 July would he making a etatement on the mail-intercept
program before the Postal Facilities, Mail, and Labor
Management Subcommittee of the House Post Office and Civil
Service Committee. The bag of mail was a hot potato.
Kalaris's memorandum to ADDO Blee dated 3 July 1975 tells

the story. **

"1. In the course of preparing for a move of CI
Project materials from one vault to another, we found, on
top of a shelf, a dispatch [dated] 27 March 1972 from{cos
Panama city] to Chief WE. This dispatch forwarded 114 items
mailed from the Soviet Union to various persons in the U.S.

_- 3
+firnest Taikerdanag) CI 088-75, 17 June 1975
ee CI 113-75, 3 July 1975 .

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These had been in a package delivered to a doctor in the
lo 16-7 _
feanal zone), who turned them ovar to the [Station] which in

turn forwarded them to Headquarters. The dispatch was

passed to CI Staff by WH Division in 1972. A note on the os
dispatch indicates that CI Staff took no action other than

to process the materials into its files; but the cI Project

continued to hold the originals. At the time CI Projact

theorized that a mailing label on a package fron(Olympus 27

Corporation] in New Hyde Park, New York, to the fcanat zone]

doctor had fallen off the package for the doctor, and been

erroneously fastened toe the package containing the Soviet

mail.

"2. This is the only case as far as we know in which
the original mail has been held by this Agency. In all
other cases we examined the mail, opened it surreptitiously,
photographed it, and put it back into the mail channels for
delivery to the addressee. Thus, this presants us with a
peculiar problem. The letters have all been opened with a
letter opener. We do not know at what point along the way

the letters were opened.

"3. We solicit your advice. There seams to be at
least two courses which we might pursue. We could send
these items to the people to whom they are addressed, under
cover of a letter explaining how we had acquired the mail
and apologizing for our delay in forwarding it. Another
course of action would be to reinsert the mail into the
postal system by forwarding it under cover of a memorandum
to the U.S. Postal] Service, In the memorandum we would
state that the mail came into our hands overseas, and was

inadvertently held. The memorandum would further state that
&

this Agency does not know at what point the mail was opened.

“Attachments: 114 Items

2 [iungarian custdn's {sic} Declarations/

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1 U.S. Registered Mail/Return Receipt
65 Post Cards
25 Letters

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1 Gvedisn custom's (sic} Declarations]

~-The person who brought the letters to Kalaria, the
supervisor of the summar employee who actually found then,
was known to be an Angleton loyalist, and Kalaris could see
a trap unfolding in front of him if he mishandled the
matter. The deliverer could be expected to tell Angleton
just what was done with the letters, and Angleton to find
ways to exploit any ill] conceived decisions. After due
deliberation, the staff of the Senate committee was
informed, and on 16 July, not quite two weeks after the
initial memorandum on this subject, the DCT sent the mail to
the Postmaster General under cover of a letter explaining
the situation. The Postmaster General in turn sent a copy
of this letter, along with the actual mail and a letter of
his own, to each addressee. The Postmaster General's letter
referred to “apparent interception and acknowledged
retention of this mail py the CIA," and described the matter
as "a serious violation of your rights" and “abuse of the
mails."* In due course some of the recipients wrete letters

to the DCI asking whether CIA had dossiers on them. .

in April a folder with some|MORINE. material was found
in an R&A safe and delivered to McCoy, who, believing that
he had stumbled upon an overlooked vein of
counterintelligence gold, brought the matter to Kalaris's
attention. HORINE in fact had not been overlooked by
Angleton, but this was not apparent at the time. The
discovery of this folder le@ to a memorandum to Nelson a few

rau
days later, entitled “Skeletons in the CIOPS Closet,

* OF 180-75, 15 August 1975

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the etaff, on its own and wien coordination with the
division, had passed to (foreign liaison) a copy of a Fiss ~

containing division-controlled NOFORN information.

co: 5. sposal an

The paper-and-records problem was high on the agenda of
issues that needed to be addressed. The quantity that the
Angleton vaults and safes contained was almost overwhelming,
and much of this had never been made available outside the
staff. Integration of this uniqua data into the DO records
system not only made common sense; it was an obvious
prerequisite to the staff rejoining the directorate.

Kalaris had no problem in principle with the concept of
keeping certain information within the staff, as SE did with
ite fazsTorac# system, but the Angleton team had gone
overboard. Whether for reasons of bureaucratic style or
fear of penetration of the Agency, information of all kinds
and from ail kinds of sources had been held privately. All
this had first to he reviewed to identify what was
appropriate to retain and what was not, and the appropriate

then made retrievable.

In the wake of the Rockefeller Commission investigation
and the Church and Pike committee hearings, the Agency and
the DO were busy writing regulations and providing
guidelines to operating elements on what was and was not
proper activity, particularly vis-a-vis US persons. For
the cI Staff, this heavily involved definitions of subjects
and activities that merited staff attention. Executive  ° +
Orders would later provide a framework, albeit often
maddeningly imprecise, for these questions, but the first of

these addressing US foreign intelligence activitites, E.0.

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11905, was not issued until February 1976." In the
meanwhile, advice from the Hill and the lawyers supplied the
framework. And there appeared to be hundreds, perhaps
thousands of files in the Angleton staff that had been
created and maintained according te criteria, e.g.,

anticommunism, that did not fit these guidelines.

Establishment of a guideline that counterintelligence
files were not to be established and maintained solely on
the basis of items in the prese provided for elimination of
a large percentage of the material that had been collected
by the Angleton staff, prominent among this being files on
Henry Kiesinger, W. Averell Harriman, and some 30-40 US
congressmen, among others. Common sense provided other
working guidelines such as, for example, the simplistic role
of thumb: if a file has some linkage to reality, retain it;
if not, destroy it. People from RID were brought in to help
decide what should go into the overall records system, and
what did not belong there. Some of them effectively moved
into the staff. And they were not the only outsiders to do
this. In July 1975 the Department of Justice sent some
lawyers to review the HTLINGUAL material, and when they
discovered that there were 27 boxes of it in one of the
etaff vaults it was decided that the best place for them to™
do their work would be right there. Three desks were set up

for them in the vault.

Some statistics fram monthly reports at the time give a
glimpse of the Augean task of dealing with all of this paper

and records.

-- January 1976: Five Branch personnel spent 2-1/2

days reviewing all files held in the branch fer a count of |

* Signed by President Gerald R. Ford, February 18, 1976.

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how many of these fileé were on US citizens. Total count
was 1,018 files on Americans.

-- March 1976: All (41 linear feet) Golitsyn file
material held in records center has been recalled and a

review begun. In May six more feet were acquired from SE,

-- July: CI/RGA Index currently contains about 255,000

ecards, down over 11,000 in last ten months.

-- August: Golitsyn material nas now been

consolidated; about 15 linear feet have been destroyed.

-~ September: Approximately 40,000 cards vere
destroyed; they duplicated a more complete index maintained

by SE/CI.

‘== October: CI/R&A index has been purged of all cards
duplicated in DO main index--over 12,000 cards were removed

and destroyed.

-- February 1977: Four ISG analysts were assigned to
R&A to assist in the processing and integration of CI Staff

records into the DO central systen.

The "HONETOL" files appalled the new CI staff in their
nunbers and, as they were read, their scope and the
hollowness of the reeds upon which they had been built.+*
HONETOL had not yet become natorious to the outeide world,
but inside it was perceived as a problem of major

proportions, If, on the one hand, these files actually

« The term "HONETOL" maant Golitsyn leads to a penetration
of the United States--CIA as well as other US institutions.
This led to two kinds of files: the leads themselves, as
Golitsyn provided and described them (e.g., a file on the
lead “Sasha"); and files on suspects, i.e., pereons

suspected of being the subject of a lead. Actual leads were |
very few; suspects were very many. .

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contained evidence of a penetration of CIA, this clearly was
eof vital importance. If, on the other hand, they did not,
_it was important that this be recognized and the files and
suspicions appropriately dealt with. Furie Fox} a lawyer
by education who joined the staff in late summer 1975, was
assigned to study these files. A procedure was developed
whereby he reviewed each one by one, and prepared a summary
of its contents. This went forward to Kalaris with, in each
instance, a recommendation on the cover sheet for
disposition. On file after file these cover sheets ended up
saying the same thing: that the file had been reviewed,
that the conclusion had been reached that there was nothing
of merit in it, and the file should be destoyed. The review
of the file on Richard Kovich, for example, which was eight
pages long, was dated 22 December 1975.* Kalaris,
concurring, sent it to ADDO Blee with a handwritten note
that the material in this case would be packaged and held
with instructions that it should be destroyed as soon as the
Senate released CIA from its embargo on destruction, and
that the summary memo and cover sheet would constitute the
only future recard. The HONETOL files received steady but
not priority attention. It took somewhat over a year for
[Fox] to make his way through all of then. Nothing of merit

was found in any of then.

A special approach was developed to get the MORINE/ data
into central indices. As a result of the compartmentation
applied to, MORINE’ in the Angleton staff, much of the
existing ‘MORINE information was squirreled away and not
immediately appreciated. The rejuvenated exploitation
program produced a flaad of ZRTAPFY] correspondance with
field stations, but this was slow to yield indexable
material. It was not until the end of 1975 that a focused 4

* Richard Kovich was one of the three CIA staff officers
most severely affected by the HONETOL witch-hunt.

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analytical effort on MORINE got underway. Beginning then

with the cassette material (ec cpst) tnternational Department”

trainee names), and later with country summary reports when
sé analysie and liaison feedback fleshed out an understanding

of GRU residency personnel and operations, ,MORINE’ data were

provided by the staff to SE Division, which in turn conveyed

them on to RIO0 under SE Division documant (SX) numbers as

[Aestoracd information. Names of GRU officers, code names

and true names (where known) of agents and davelopmentals,

support assets, etc. were indexed in this fashion.

Res i
-
The Kalaris staff inherited responsibility for 4
handful of defectors and certain contract personnel who had
heen working for the Angleton staff. This responsibility

was not particularly welcomed, but it had to be dealt with.

yr The defectors were Golitsyn, Nosenko, Deryabin, and
[Rastvorov, “and a former Romanian Jintelligence officer by the
name of}/Constantin Dumitrachescu,] also known as[unpivor/if
The Soviets were well known, at least by reputation, to the
SE alumni on the staff, but the (Romanian was a total

surprise. They had never heard of him,*

zy
In early 1972 the [Israeli internal service (Shin net)}
had approached CIA through Angleton and asked for aseistance
QO in arranging the defection and resettlement of bok
* Chief, SE (Blee) had been avare of (Dunitrachesen's/
defection at the time, and had deduced, and ultimately

obtained confirmation from the DDO, that Angleton had
arranged to bring him to the United States and had him

squirreled away.

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This would suggest that Angleton may have lacked the
epportunity that others had had to observe the kinds of
behavior Soviet defectors have displayed in sorting out who
the important players are in matters affecting their future,

and figuring out how to deal with them. *

--In the eyes of some who knew him, Angleton viewed
himself more as chief of an operational entity than of a
staff. Few gave him high marks as an effective staff, as
opposed to operations, officer. His secret travels in

Weatarn Europe, not to mention to Israel, to meet with

senior liaison officials with whom he had developed
confidential relationships constituted a form of independent
operational activity. The proposal, ultimately stillborn, |
in 1965 for Angleton to develop special counterintelligence

units in Vietnam*s displayed certain parallels with his |
conduct. of counterintelligence abroad as Chief of the cr

Staff in the way in which the local station would be |
effectively cut out and command channel and communications

would run direct to counterintelligence headquarters in

Washington. The proposed special caunterintelligence (SCI)

units for Vietnam were modeled after SCI units employed by

X-2, the counterintelligence arm of the wartime OSS--where

Angleton began his intelligence career. Perhaps those early

experiences shaped in some way Angleton's dater preference

for conducting counterintelligence--by himself, without

invoivement of the araa divisions and stations.

--,and What To Do About Iti Game plan

The Pian

In assessing the state of affairs in the staff, it did,

* Angleton may have had some exposure, probably during the
1950s, to pre-War (1938) KGA defector Aleksandr Orlov.

*#*#-Ak described in Clevaland C. Cram's history of the CT
Staff (to 1974),[Vvol.x, pp. 1004 ££°

24, a
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* . '
1 ry

6treamline our procedures."*

By 1976 the office of the Executive Officer of the’
| Staff included a Privacy Act Section with four positions in
addition to a three-person Records and Registry Section.
| (FOIA and Privacy Act requests were handled together.) But
this by no means solved the problem. In the fall of 1977,
| as DO ceiling and personnel reductions were being meted out
and the staff was trying to gear itself to getting along
with less, the DDO was advised that the staff's Privacy Act
Section was 60 strained and ite personnel under so much
preséure that henceforth it would not accept deadlines
imposed by elements outside the staff. When requirements
were received, the section would advise the requester how

much time would be required te complete the work.

But norma) FOIA and Privacy Act requests were not all;
~ there were also specialty ragquests that had to be met. All
had the common denominator of the staff's unique files and

recorde. These included such matters aa:

-- FOIA requests for information concerning Lee Harvey
Osewald.** Handling these required the creation of a task
force of 13 operations officers and analysts, plus clerical

personnel, and their full-time efforts for over a month.

-- Requests for interviews and/or information from the
Senate and House Select Intelligence Committees, and the

Department of Justice.

-- A review of the Resanberg case by a Federal court,

which caused problems with reqard to related VENONA

* CI 131-78, 9 July 75
*k Nosenko's assertion that he was familiar with the KGB's ,
. asseesmant of and involvement with Oswald in the Soviet
i. Union had led to endless debriefing, analysis, and cross-
checking research on this subject.
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United Statea: “In each case you open a file on there nust
be a demonstrable Cf interest. Please assure that thie
guideline is followed meticulously." ,

eub e e~ Was charged with the
és conduct of and coordination on double agent operations
abroad. Since the vast majority of DA cases were run by the
US military services, the FBI, or--in some instances--
“foreign-liaison services, the branch was very heavily a
coordinator rather than active runner of operations.

[axe o io 76 -- Was charged with
coordination with the area divisions on matters of CI
interest, and with stimulating CI disciplines and practices
in the area divisions and field stations. The centerpiece
of the branch's activity was management and conduct of the
CI Survey program. Consisting itself only of the branch
chief and two clericals, the branch staffed its survey teams
with detailees from the area divisions and CI Staff officers

borrowed from other branches of the staff, both Ops and R&A.

one Branch -- Was charged with
operations designed to counter and disrupt the activities
abroad of foreign intelligence services inimical to US
f interests. Charlies Anderson, an LA Division officer who was)
brought in to the staff by Sternfield to head the branch,
had had considerable experience in CA operations, and the
branch's activities reflected this background. virtually
all had a clear CA character, from promotion of a hook about
the Tupamdros and terrorism in Uruguay, to a press campaign
in Europe designed to expose the Curiel apparatus as an
_inetrument of Soviet intelligence, to a paper on the Cuban
intelligence residency in Chile during the Allende regime.
Primary orientation was toward Latin America, with heavy as
focus on terrorist organizations and activities. Anderson's
operations tended to be highly imaginative, often complex, /

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PAPER: THE IMS TEAM FINALLY GOFS HOME

In May 1980 the IMS analyst group detailed to the CI
Staff to deal with the paper inherited from the Angleton
Staff finally completed its work and returned to IMS, In
all, @auring the preceding four and a half years some 600 feet
of CI Staff files had been reviewed, about 375 feet by IMS
and 225 feet by CI Staff personnel The Analysis Group matin

index had been reduced from 500,000 cards in 1975 to 28,000,

DERYABIN RETIRES

Peter (Petr) Deryabin retired in January 1981 on the eve
ef hig 60th birthday, One of the early group of KGB officers
to come to the West following the death of Stalin in 1953, he
had defected in Vienna in 1954. Since that time he had been
continually assaciated with, and in effect a ward of the CI

Staff. For a number of years he, along with other defectors,

. 14

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